“And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out” isn’t only a terrific Yo La Tengo album from 2000. It’s also a pretty good description for the output of the visionary Buckminster Fuller, who died in 1983. Fuller’s 60-year attempt to shape the future defies summarization, blending colossal failures and head-scratchers (borrowing from Yo La Tengo, let’s call those “nothing”) with massive, globe-trotting success (the inverse of “nothing”).
Explaining the life of a kooky, brilliant man — he lectured without notes, and once gave a 42-hour talk titled “Everything I Know” — requires its own kooky brilliance. And we found exactly that this week at SFMOMA, watching The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, a “live documentary” by Sam Green, the Bay Area-based filmmaker. Green, upon receiving MOMA’s commission for a one-night-only film on Fuller (“Oh yeah, the dome guy!” he recalls thinking), called on Yo La Tengo to write and perform its score. The event coincided with “The Utopian Impulse,” an SFMOMA exhibit, on view until July 29, examining Fuller’s impact on the sustainable-design boom that began in the Bay Area decades ago.
I repeat: we’ve got the polymath inventor who brought geodesic domes to the masses, a filmmaker known for exploring obscurities, retro-chic concepts in sustainable design, plus freaking Yo La Tengo. If all that sounds like a particularly awesome broadcast of Radiolab, well, it felt like one too.
Hey, what do you think a “live documentary” would look like? I wouldn’t have guessed a PowerPoint presentation, but I’ve also never seen PowerPoints as affecting as what Green showed and narrated into a microphone, flipping between still images and film clips gleaned from the Dymaxion Chronofile. That was Fuller’s name for his immense personal archive, which is now held at one of Stanford’s archives and totally accessible for public perusal. (The Chronofile happens to be the largest single-person archive in the history of the world. Think about that.)
Only a few minutes in to the hour-long show, it was pretty easy to forget that we were watching a humble, low-tech duet of images and music. I could only focus on Fuller’s sentimentalist, all-too-human charm. Add Yo La Tengo’s warmly propulsive rhythms, and I felt wrapped in my favorite blankie, ready for story and nappytime.
And story we got. In his charmingly wry drawl, Green addressed Fuller’s early and late tragedies. His daughter contracted meningitis and died; he almost committed suicide by jumping into Lake Michigan (but had a mystical vision instead); his famous Dymaxion Car, which got 30 miles per gallon and held seating for eleven, crashed at the very entrance to the 1933 World’s Fair, killing its driver; his well-known dome for Montreal’s Expo 67 caught fire and sat there looking like junk for a few years. But, as Green pointed out, “failure breeds progress.” So we also learned of Fuller’s goals for the world, or as he called it, “Spaceship Earth.” Throughout the 60s and 70s, Fuller’s utopian impulse came to define a generation that doesn’t look too different from the one I’m in: we’re all trying to do more with less. He sought to improve the lives of everyone (he was literally talking about everyone) through schemes to prevent the over-accumulation of resources in one place over another, “so that no man can take advantage of another.” Hell of a guy! I can’t help wondering how he’d see the trajectory of Spaceship Earth today.
Yo La Tengo, set up on the stage’s side opposite Green, did exactly what soundtrack artists are meant to do: show off the work they’re backing and not their own talents. They de-emphasized melody and stuck to rhythms and little dissonances, and ultimately found a tenuous, inspiring resolution. (Asked about plans for recording and releasing the music we heard, bassist James McNew said, “you had to be here. And we’re glad you were here.”) The band’s hyper-competent fluidity mirrored the timeless charm of Bucky’s interactions with pretty much everyone in the world.
In one excerpted film, Buckminster Fuller Meets the Hippies, Fuller is seen in his trademark black suit and Clark Kent glasses, lecturing to a dirty, hairy crowd at Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park. He held a toddler on his lap, and listened patiently to a fantastically tripped-out dude with a beard who rattled off a series of cascading associations — inspired, I think, by geodesic domes and the consistency of the universe — and summed it all up with “Zap! Star of David.”
Kind of like that hippie, I really like Fuller, and I really, really like what he was trying to do. But even after this show and its exhibit, I still don’t really understand the great man’s theories. I’m not sure it’s even possible to explain them fully, and there’s no way to know whether he’d find his efforts a success today. He’d probably tell us to keep looking, keep inventing, because only in quitting have we really lost. Zap. Star of David.
“The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller” appeared at the Phyllis Wattis Theater in San Francisco on May 1, 2012. This review was written for SFWeekly.com.
Walk Around Time 